December 07, 2002

Un Chien Andalou

I love accidentally stumbling onto something wondrous when I am bouncing through web sites looking for something entirely else.

I wasn't even looking for anything close to Surrealist or Dada just now -- but some link -- well -- rather dadaistically bounced me onto this lovely page on Surrealism and Dada.

Usually on the web, as I'm sure y'all know from experience, clicking or merely mousing over some inadvertent link half by accident will condemn you to advert hell. The pop-ups of pornland, a morass of travel booking adverts, or -- my personal fave -- a particularly insistent and infernal webcam ad that has been popping up for at least two or three years straight. The same friggin' ad. At least, this is what happens to me in my version of a web-esque No Exit.

So, I was utterly stunned and euphoric to have accidentally bounced myself over to this page where a Duchamp piece told me I hadn't been thrown into the cavern of advert land! I have no idea what I clicked on to get there either .... Someone was being a clever little surrealist javascript coder somewhere, I guess. Hehe. Well done.

But! Even better than the Duchamp at the top of the page .... I was excited to find towards the bottom a link to a Quicktime version of the 1929 film "Un Chien Andalou." Which, if you don't know, is a film done by Salvador Dali and Luis Buñuel when they were just kinda fooling around with what was then the new medium of film.

Yay.

I first saw "Un Chien Andalou" ages ago in college in a seminar on classic avant-garde films. I don't remember all the films we saw during that course, although I recall a few of them: a film version of Sartre's "No Exit," a few other Buñuel filims ("Exterminating Angel" amongst others) and also two or three short evocative pieces by Maya Deren.

And, sadly, I don't think I've seen any of them again since.

Perhaps why I got so overly-excited at the idea I could watch the whole of "Un Chien Andalou" in my browser.

If I were a proper film buff, I would cart myself regularly to some arthouse theatre because, yeah, I know they run all of these old films at such places from time to time. But I guess I'm not a proper film buff.

And I just don't go to movie theatres much. Everyone thinks I'm insane when I say simply I don't like watching movies in movie theatres.

"But you gotta see THIS film in the theatre," they wail. "You have to see it on the big screen!"

No. I don't. I don't like movie theatres.

"Why not?" they wail.

It's an idiosyncractic aversion and irrational. Like green eggs and ham, I do not like them, that's the way I am.

Besides, those rare times when someone does succeed at dragging me out to a movie, they then get to feel very accomplished because it's pretty well-known amongst my acquaintances that I don't go to the movies.

Instead, I watch old movies on cable at 3:16 am and enjoy myself thoroughly.

Or I find a Quicktime version of "Un Chien Andalou" on a web page at 5:48 am and shout out loud with glee.

I am replete.

Au printemps.